intimately affiliated with various politicians of
influence, a friend of one of whom went on Summerfield's bond, when the
latter was being prosecuted for the "sick-engineer" frauds to the extent
of $30,000. They regularly went to Europe in the summer season and could
be seen at all the race-courses and gambling resorts of the Continent.
It is amusing to chronicle in this connection that just prior to
McPherson's arrest--that is to say during the summer vacation of
1904--he crossed the Atlantic on the same steamer with an assistant
district attorney of New York county, who failed to recognize his ship
companion and found him an entertaining and agreeable comrade.

The trial came on before Judge Warren W. Foster in Part 3 of the General
Sessions on February 27th, 1906. A special panel quickly supplied a
jury, which, after hearing the evidence, returned in short order a
verdict of guilty. As Judge Foster believed the McCord case to be still
the law of the State, he, of his own motion, and with commendable
independence, immediately arrested judgment. The People thereupon
appealed, the Court of Appeals sustained Judge Foster, and the defendant
was discharged. It is, however, satisfactory to record that the
Legislature at its next session amended the penal code in such a way as
to entirely deprive the wire-tappers and their kind of the erstwhile
protection which they had enjoyed under the law.

V

The Franklin Syndicate

When Robert A. Ammon, a member of the New York bar, was convicted, after
a long trial, on the 17th of June, 1903, of receiving stolen goods, he
had, in the parlance of his class, been "due" for a long time. The
stolen property in question was the sum of thirty thousand five hundred
dollars in greenbacks, part of the loot of the notorious "Franklin
Syndicate," devised and engineered by William F. Miller, who later
became the catspaw of his legal adviser, the subject of this history.

Ammon stood at the bar and listened complacently to his sentence of not
less than four years at hard labor in Sing Sing. A sneer curved his lips
as, after nodding curtly to his lawyer, he turned to be led away by the
court attendant. The fortune snatched from his client had procured for
him the most adroit of counsel, the most exhaustive of trials. He knew
that nothing had been left undone to enable him to evade the
consequences of his crime, and he was cynically content.

For years "Bob" Ammon had been a familiar fi